DVD players Going bad????

I'm getting fed up with DVD players that seem to be going bad within 1 year to year and a half of time. I've went through various brands and models from LG, Magnavox, Cyberhome (2 exact models, same issue), Panasonic (2 exact models, same issue), Aiwa and more. At first, I thought it was the DVD's themselves. But after trying new DVD players, those "defective" disks, worked like magic. Note that I'm using both store bought and DVD-R disks, that gets the same exact results.

What am I doing wrong? Is the programming going bad? Are they not "perfected" yet? More so, should I throw them away and forget "stand alone" units all together?

Does anyone have any input into this? I'd like to hear if you've seen anything on the web, news, etc., about this particular problem.

emmgee
haven't read anything yet on this subject but I agree with some of what you are saying it seems stand-alone-players seem to be designed to last the warranty-year and Bamm they're dead.
I guess the positive is that they are so cheap nowadays.
I bought my recent stand-alone from Target and it was a cheap crappy model but (knock on wood) it's the best I've ever had
I've had three dvd players in as many years
I don't believe you are doing anything wrong but a lens-clean is always helpful to maintain the lens
anyway, thanks for raising an interesting subject I'll keep looking at this

That's just the issue. The Player's lens had been cleaned, The DVD's have been cleaned off, using a "lint free shammy" from the "Earbugger cleaning kit," etc.

I'm kinda wondering if the "cache" or memory is going bad in these. It seems to happen with both store bought and personally made disks of various brands, various speeds. I don't really think it's the bit rate, because the units work for a while, then the machine goes bad. However, some machines WILL not play "long play" or certain recorded/burned bit rates lower than 45000 kb/sec. This doesn't seem to be the case though.

Players that won't play "lower bit rate" disks, usually have audio and video that go out of sync, almost right away. This is not that particular issue. However, I agree that ALL stand alone DVD players, should play ANY DVD disk and be standardized. It should make little to no difference on bit rate(s).

The "going bad" starts like a "blocky" picture that plays, but has "cubes" in the picture. After that, the video pauses. Then comes the dreaded audio and video pausing. Stopping and restarting clears it up for a bit, but the process starts again in a few minutes.

Like I said before, doesn't matter what brand I've used, where I purchased them, cost of the equipment, what disks are used, etc. The process of the machine going bad still persists.

Note that all disks used work in other stand alone DVD units, including portables, at that particular time. From that, I can easily conclude that it isn't a bad disk.